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PORK, LOIN OF, MARINADED AND BAKED (a German recipe)
Take the skin from a loin of pork, lay the meat in a deep earthen pan, pour over it half a pint of vinegar, and put with it two sliced onions, twelve young sage-leaves, a sprig of thyme and sweet basil, a dozen juniper berries, six cloves, twenty bruised peppercorns, and a table-spoonful of salt. Let the pork remain in this marinade five or six days, turning and basting it twice a day. Take it up, put it with the pickle into a baking-dish, and baste frequently. When it is about half baked, pour half a cupful of boiling water into the dish, strain the gravy, and put it back. When the meat is sufficiently cooked, serve on a hot dish, skim the gravy, and pour it round. Time to bake, twenty-five minutes to the pound. Probable cost, 9 1/2d. to 10 1/2d. per pound.
A sharp, juniper-and-sage vinegar marinade on a bone-in pork loin, with the marinade itself becoming the basting liquid and the sauce. Two things need updating: where the meat sits for those days, and how long it stays in the oven.
- Marinate cold, and shorten itThe original assumes a cool stone larder; five or six days of raw pork at kitchen temperature is not safe now. Marinate in the refrigerator in a glass, glazed or stainless vessel, and give it two to three days at most, turning twice a day.
- The cutA Victorian loin of pork came skin-on and bone-in, closer to what a butcher now calls a rack or bone-in loin roast. A 4-5 lb bone-in loin serves six to eight; a boneless loin works but will dry out faster, so watch it closely.
- Oven and internal temperatureBake at 350F and go by a thermometer, not the clock: pull the roast at 145F in the thickest part and rest it 10-15 minutes. Twenty-five minutes to the pound was written for meat cooked far past what we would now call done, and will give you a grey, fibrous loin.
- Vinegar quantityHalf a pint in imperial measure is 10 fl oz, about a cup and a quarter. Use a plain cider or white wine vinegar rather than a harsh distilled one, and expect to add water or wine if the marinade does not come at least halfway up the meat in a narrower dish.
- Juniper berriesBruise them with the flat of a knife to open them up. A dozen is assertive but correct for pork; they are the flavour that makes this read as German rather than English.
- Roasting in the pickleStraining the gravy midway is probably not fussiness -- the onion, herbs and peppercorns can scorch on the bottom of a hot dish and turn the sauce bitter. Strain, deglaze with the half cup of boiling water, and return the liquid to keep basting.
- Finishing the gravySkim thoroughly; the roast will throw fat into the pan, and vinegar-based pan juices separate visibly. The sauce is meant to be thin and sharp, not thickened, so pour it round the meat rather than over it.
Cassell's flagged this one as German, and the tell is the marinade: vinegar, onion, juniper and cloves held on meat for days is the same treatment that produces Sauerbraten, the sour roast of German home cooking, applied here to pork instead of beef. Before reliable refrigeration an acid pickle did double duty -- it flavoured and tenderised, and it bought a joint extra days of life in the larder. The book priced every entry, a habit that tells you the readership was managing a household budget as closely as a menu. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran thousands of such entries alphabetically, borrowing freely from French and German practice and labelling the borrowings, and the sage leaves here are a quiet English concession to a Continental method.